The Bull Case for Sierra Nevada’s Under-the-Radar ‘Hype Brewery’ Line

A problem — the problem? — for first-generation craft breweries is as follows.

1. Everybody knows your iconic beer.
2. Everybody loves your iconic beer.
3. Nobody buys your iconic beer.

We have contemplated this paradox many times here at Hop Take over the years. Recall the disastrous redesign Sapporo USA Sapporo Stone Brewing Sapporo USA put poor Anchor Brewing Company through at the beginning of this decade. Lament the ignominious demise of the original source of Leinenkugel’s beloved shandy. Bear witness to the regrettable unraveling of Rogue Ales & Spirits. And so on and so forth.

Complicating matters, pioneering breweries face a double-bind as they try to breathe new life into old brands. I framed up the problem in January 2023 about New Belgium Brewery’s then-new facelift for Fat Tire:

If Fat Tire were an actual bicycle, most people would put it on Craigslist and call it a day. But New Belgium can’t toss its former glory on the junk heap just yet. Even as younger drinkers gravitate toward the Voodoo Ranger clan’s bolder flavors and packaging, there are plenty of Gen Xers and Millennials with plenty of money for whom Fat Tire represents the golden era of early 21st-century American craft brewing. People still drink it! And despite its diminished stature, Fat Tire is still a top-20 craft brand overall. So New Belgium went for an overhaul instead, reformulating a “crisper, brighter” liquid and giving it a slick new package that calls attention to its eco-friendly credentials and omits its middling 5 percent ABV and outmoded style. “There’s a challenge to recharge heritage brands,” New Belgium vice president of marketing Kyle Bradshaw told Brewbound earlier this month, adding that the move “feels like a big risk” given Fat Tire’s outsized legacy.

That’s the rub. The American drinking public likes the idea of these classic craft beers much more than it actually likes buying them. To tinker with them too much is to invite much nostalgic gnashing of teeth; to leave them entirely untinkered with, to embrace decline.

Next year, Sierra Nevada Brewing Company — purveyor of the eponymous, irreproachable Pale Ale since 1980 — will take its biggest steps yet down the middle path. It’s been a long time coming.

“Five or six years ago when I started with Sierra, you know, one of the things that we were having to overcome was this perception of being ‘grocery store craft,’” says Kyle Ingram, Sierra Nevada’s senior director of innovation, in a phone interview with Hop Take. “Which is not quite an endearing term, not one that we were super proud of.”

The California outfit, which just last year edged out fellow first-waver Boston Beer Company in Brewers Association-defined craft beer barrelage, worked the problem from multiple angles. It recently unveiled its plans to refresh the packaging on a slate of core portfolio brands, including — gasp — Pale Ale itself in fall 2027. “Our portfolio had developed over such a long period of time that it didn’t look coherent on display, and I think some of it had aged and we needed to shake the dust off,” Sierra Nevada chief executive Pryce Greenow explained to Brewbound at a wholesaler conference at its North Carolina plant last month.

It bears mentioning that the company is actually embarking on that tightrope walk from a position of relative strength. According to multi-outlet grocery, mass retail, and convenience stores tracked by the market-research firm Circana, Sierra Nevada’s portfolio grew 1.9 percent in dollars and 0.2 percent in case volume year-to-date through September 6, outpacing the declining category and the even-more-rapidly declining craft segment within it.

Perhaps emboldened by that trend-bucking performance, the invigoration effort won’t stop with refreshes, though. “When you have a healthy core, it allows you to innovate in a way where we’re not dependent on that [new] thing being big and successful right out of the gate,” says Ingram.

To that end, Sierra Nevada has cued up two of its boldest portfolio expansions in recent memory. Crafted By Sierra Nevada, a line featuring “spiked agave seltzer” (read: hard seltzer) Agua Azul and “beer soda” (read: radler) Shred, marks the firm’s first major foray into the “beyond beer” space since it spun up and wound down also-ran entrants Tea West and Strainge Beast earlier this decade. The new fermentables are already on (or soon to hit) shelves in test markets bearing subordinated branding from the mothership.

“The question has always been can we win in those spaces without leveraging the awareness and the credibility of the Sierra Nevada brand, but also to do so without disparaging or diluting the equity of the Sierra Nevada brand for a loyal beer drinker?” says Ingram, to whom fell the unenviable responsibility of pitching founder Ken Grossman on a beer soda called Shred. “I remember thinking distinctly, this might be my last pitch,” he tells Hop Take, laughing.

Whether Craft By Sierra Nevada’s offerings can thrive — or even survive — in a lucrative-but-tricky flavored malt beverage pseudosegment dominated by scaled flavor-chasers like Mark Anthony Group, Anheuser-Busch InBev, and BBC remains to be seen. But to your humble Hop Take columnist’s eye, the thesis on those products is sound.

This brings us to the Hidden Scroll series. Unlike Crafted By, this new “brand family” is composed of honest-to-goodness beers, but it is tasked with a more ambitious goal. Namely: to score big, consistent Sierra Nevada some of the lucre and latter-day cachet of small, dynamic “hype breweries.”

“That guy who is paying 25 bucks for a four-pack, he’s looking for some of the more local, the more ‘hype’ kind of breweries in that space,” says Ingram. “We’re certainly capable and credible from a brewing standpoint, but maybe that’s not the area of the shelf or the cooler where people are looking for Sierra Nevada.” Building on the promise of West Ghost India Pale Ale — a semi-branded offering that made the transition from taproom-only bestseller to national packaged distribution in early 2026 — the company has formalized its higher-pricepoint ambitions under Hidden Scroll, so named because beers under this aegis will not feature the venerable gold sheafing that adorns labels in the core portfolio.

“That’s the first thing we want people to see, it’s the thing that brings that credibility, but we weren’t sure that it was working to our advantage in this space,” says Ingram of the scroll design. Instead: “Let’s grab shoppers’ attention with really cool modern artwork, because that’s a lot of how these guys shop.” He should know — by his own admission, he’s one of them.

For 2027, Sierra Nevada has retooled West Ghost’s packaging, and is deliberating over which of the other Hidden Scrolls beers it’s been testing in its taprooms it will put into 4-packs and push into distribution. Potential options include Boat Plane, a West Coast Pilsner, and Lava Lamp, a double IPA. The cans feature art-forward designs printed on the white matte labeling that’s become a visual lingua franca among more specialty craft offerings. There’s very little obvious connection to the brewery from whence they came but for a “Sierra Nevada Brewing Co., Chico, CA & Mills River, NC” demarcation along the bottom in small letters, and a faint scroll that’s been blended — hidden — into the illustration.

“People aren’t grabbing it because it’s from Sierra Nevada, they’re finding out that it’s from Sierra Nevada after they’ve already thrown a couple back,” says Ingram. “It’s been wildly successful for us, relative to the size of the category. We had a hard time keeping up with the volume in the first few months.”

Here, another rub. A core appeal of “hype” beers — to the extent that such appeal still exists at scale as we enter the back half of the ‘20s — is their scarcity, esotericism, and rapid-fire release cadence. Would, say, Other Half Brewing Company’s offerings have captivated finance bros late last decade if they were available in a dozen states, rather than only via a hole-in-the-wall across the street from a McDonald’s in central Brooklyn? Or, asked another way, is that sort of “hype” compatible with a Sierra Nevada sort of craft brewery?

I ask Ingram to square this circle.

For all Sierra Nevada’s logistical and technical advantages, “we have some disadvantages too. We’re not built to do small things really, really fast,” he concedes. “We’re not really designed to. That’s not the game that we’re playing, but we still feel like we can have a meaningful place in this category.”

Can Hidden Scroll find a place among the hype beer pantheon? Can Crafted By Sierra Nevada succeed where previous beyond-beer bids have failed? Can this four-decade firm bust the double-bind that has hemmed in so many craft beer brands of a certain age? Sierra Nevada has put together a compelling case. But only John Q. Guzzler can make the call.

🤯 Hop-ocalypse Now

It’s no secret that Boston Beer Company has struggled mightily marketing-wise over the past few years. So the fact that it has a new chief marketing officer lined up isn’t surprising. But Allison Stransky, who starts October 12, has a resume that ought to raise some eyebrows: she’s taking this job after serving as the marketing lead for Samsung Electronics America. Can you pitch Samuel Adams the same way you pitch smartphones? Trade wisdom holds that you cannot. But we’ll see!

📈 Ups…

BBC taproom workers in Boston voted “overwhelmingly” to join the Teamsters… The THC drinks industry scored a brief stay of execution earlier this month when President Trump signed a bill kicking the can(nabis) to mid-December… New Belgium Brewery announced plans to open a “Liquid Center” (i.e., taproom) at Voodoo Ranger’s plant in Virginia…

📉 …and downs

Farewell to Mary Guiver, the longtime beer lead at Whole Foods Market, who’s moving to another role within the Amazon-owned grocer… Tilray Brands partnered with Spirit Halloween for a Shock Top promotion nobody asked for… More tough news from the Twin Cities, where top-50 firm Summit Brewing faces foreclosure… Rest in peace to Triple Rock, the country’s longest continuously operating brewpub, which is slated to shut its doors in Berkeley…

The article The Bull Case for Sierra Nevada’s Under-the-Radar ‘Hype Brewery’ Line appeared first on VinePair.